What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it.

My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread; I'm selling yeast.

It is sad not to love, but it is much sadder not to be able to love.

Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems.

There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. Man is the more man - that is, the more divine - the greater his capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish.

The truth is that my work - I was going to say my mission - is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire.

To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most.